pigeon

Did you say Mars? You were wrong!

I’ve read some posts by people who are gung ho about the wonder and potential of LLMs and AI, and one of the recurring themes they write about is how much mind-bogglingly amazing stuff we can do with this technology, because the data source includes basically all human knowledge. Well it is amazing, yes, and it is certainly more information and data than I, for one, can really wrap my mind around. Like, I think most of us fail to realize just how much data these — whatever they are, programs? is that all they are? — just how much data they’re working with, and how hyperspatially fast they’re doing all these complex combinations and permutations. I mean, it is amazing, and our inability (speaking for myself, at least) to picture the true scale of it probably limits how thoroughly we can think about it, and we should keep that in mind when forming opinions or whatever it is we think we’re doing while trying to keep up with the hype, BUT — the data source definitely isn’t all human knowledge.

That seems obvious, but then again a lot of seemingly obvious things lately seem to be falling out of common awareness.

I think maybe the data set is more like a multi-dimensional intersection with human knowledge. Not a cross-section, exactly, not a “slice,” but a set of points, perhaps non-Euclidean, corresponding to a representative subset (possibly inequitably selected and interpreted) of our individual and collective attempts to represent knowledge, or if not knowledge then perhaps simply the essence of our lived experience of consciousness. Or, a random snapshot of the act of representation itself. When we interact with it, we are it, in a sense. Robert Bly might’ve said the neocortex is eating itself. Or, we’re playing a game with ourselves, and there’s no rules except that making up the rules is how you play. All we ultimately do is eat ourselves anyway, right? Neocortex, paleocortex, pons, gyri, lobules, and gravy! Yum, yum, yum! We’re born, we get hungry, we eat ourselves and each other if we’re lucky, and then we don’t die because we were actually made of information all along.

A “regular” web search unsurprisingly failed to turn up anything about the pulpy little book of science riddles that tonight’s pigeon refers to. Just to be thorough, I described it to ChatGPT and asked if it could find any traces. It directed me to a science riddle book from 2004, and when I explained that that couldn’t be it because mine was from the 70s, and I added that the main reason I had even asked was to explore an example of how the internet doesn’t represent the sum total of human knowledge, it got ruminative:

You're absolutely right, and you're touching on something really important: the illusion of total recall that the internet presents. People often assume that if something ever existed, it must be online now—but there’s a vast ocean of printed material, ephemera, and obscure publications that have never been digitized or even indexed in any meaningful way.

Well, said, Chatty old pal! (Weird how it used one straight apostrophe and one curly apostrophe, though!) By the way, the riddle to which the answer wasn’t Mars went something like “What planet has polar ice caps, canals, and {something else Mars has that I can’t remember}?” Then when you presumably guessed Mars, this nerdy little book gleefully informed you that no, those surface features on Mars were not actually canals, though we ignorant savages in the past used to think they were.

Ah, those were the days — chunky spaceflight, broadcast TV, Atari 2600, Coronamatic 2200, and, at least for a little while, a little bit of a lid on anti-intellectualism. Now I was just a dumb kid, but from what I remember, it was still kind of cool to be smart. For my age bracket, that meant for example having the real facts about space and planets and aliens — to be the one that knew 2001: A Space Odyssey was the real deal because you couldn’t hear anything in space in that movie, unlike in cheesy Star Wars, in which somehow sound traveled through a vacuum! 🙄

Not saying Star Wars wasn’t cool, though, but still.

Here’s another thing the internet can’t tell me, speaking of Coronamatic 2200: was mine teal and white with white keys, or teal and teal with white keys? I just bought one (in the parking lot of a suburban police department) from the former owner of the last typewriter shop in Milwaukee, and the whole reason I wanted it was that it was the same model and color as the one my dad brought home from his office for me when I was a kid. But now that I have it set up on the old typewriter table that I salvaged from one of the last small print shops in Milwaukee, every time I walk past it, I think, did mine actually have that much white on it?

As far as I know, there’s no photographs of my old typewriter. And the internet, even the LLM-ified internet, will definitely not be able to tell me what exact color my beloved SCM was. It wouldn’t think of something like that as important, even if it were capable of thinking of things as important or not. Would it? Maybe that’s an advantage of not being able to think of things as important or not: information is just information; pebbles are just pebbles, sand is just sand, people are just people, people are just information, and (this phrase keeps coming back to my mind like a jack of hearts I keep finding face down on the sidewalk) either all life is sacred or else none of it is. Somebody said or wrote that, but my search for who it was is unsuccesful right now (!) — I’ve been thinking for years it was in The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, but nope, apparently not.

I believe I may have blipped over to an alternate universe where everything is exactly the same except the precise amount of teal on my typewriter. WHAT IF THAT IS IMPORTANT SOMEHOW!?

The fact that I can even sit here and type all this nonsense and actually kind of enjoy the process means that, despite all the horrible shit that’s going on in the world right now, I and my kids are, at least for the moment, basically OK. When the mind has time for goofy little riddles, that’s a good sign I think. I guess that’s a selfish thought.

It was Earth, by the way. The answer to the riddle was Earth.